


Rebel, Rebel

by Missy



Category: Nashville (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Future Fic, Gen, Growing Up, Humor, Musicians, Rebellion, Teenage Rebellion, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 09:06:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1545281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Daphne is just like her father.  At least, she hopes he’s still her father.</i>  Or, Daphne Conrad grows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rebel, Rebel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DWEmma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWEmma/gifts).



> Written For DWEmma as a Rarewomen treat!

Daphne is just like her father. At least, she hopes he’s still her father. She’s steadfast like him, and loyal to her big half-sister, her mama, even to Deacon, though he doesn’t deserve it. Passionate, imperious? That she’s not. You could set a metronome by her trueness. To her mamma she’s a complete relief, and to her father she’s a shining angel. Maddie sets a shining example of tame wickedness and all Daphne has to do is live down to it.

The biggest, most frustrating part of her existence is that she’s just not exemplary. She doesn’t play guitar half as well as her sister, and she doesn’t sing just like a lark like her mother. What she knows is harmony – synching her voice to her sisters’ and making a wall of sound. The other side of the family likes to tease her that she’s meant to be a retiring lady – to wear a beautiful dress and sip gin all night among high company. Destined to do good work in a very lovely, heavily perfumed garden in the deep south. She’s been earmarked – by fate, her father or the way she’s been raised – to be a good society girl. A politician, to Maddie’s rebel.

After a few years, all of that goodness, all of those simple, sweet-natured homilies, start to chafe and wear on her nerves. She can feel them all watching her, worrying, afraid she’ll take some sort of major fall and turn into a wild child just like her sister. But in her early teens it doesn’t go much further for Daphne than a cigarette puffed illicitly behind the school, a beer stolen from her father’s refrigerator. At least it’s a step away from the good girl she dreads becoming, clichéd tho it is. Lying in bed with throbbing temples at the age of thirteen, she hopes that she’s not meant for gin and pearls in the afternoon. But the thrill wears off, her busy parents never notice her transgressions, and she shrugs, settling again for predictability over pain.

Her past pleasures are fleeting memories to her overdramatic mind. She remembers what that school concert felt like, and the accolades her parents had rained down upon her later. She’d had to share the applause with Maddie, but that was a facet of familiar life; the rewards of being semi-famous in the school hallway for a deed all her own is the baseline boon of it all. But it evaporated like the booze she’d consumed, insubstantial as a warm breeze. She goes along for the rest of her elementary and junior high school career, bobbing in Maddie’s violent wake, attending her father’s wedding, cheering her mother and Uncle Deacon on at Fan Fest, then finding herself swathed in black and attending her stepmother’s funeral.

When the internet hears her singing harmony with her sister, it’s Maddie’s name they remember –thanks to Uncle Deacon. She doesn’t even get a virtual credit for her dual harmonies; she is the background, neutral good, cream cheese in the universe’s carrot-raisin sandwich.

When she makes it to sixteen her mother throws a ranch party for her, but she disappears halfway through the proceedings to paint her lips black and comb her hair into glittery spikes. There’s a club downtown that houses a Ramones cover band and plays stuff from “End of the Century” until well past midnight, and she thinks she deserves a little bit of distance. 

Daphne’s been composing again, singing her own harmonies in the shower, on the roof, wherever she can’t be caught. These are power-chord drenched arrangements her father would never find suitable, ones that would give her mother a chuckle. But the songs are developing and growing, getting legs, slithering through her veins like a hit of cocaine. 

She thinks she might put an ad in the Reporter for a bassist and a guitarist. Nashville’s punk scene, somewhere far from the neon, steel guitars and denim that raised her, has offered her succor in her time of crises and she’ll never forget it. Hell, she might just have something original to say, if she keeps working on it.

Maybe there’s a little rebel in her after all.

Won’t that shock them?

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfiction uses characters from **Nashville** , all of whom are the property of the **ABC Network**. No money was gained from the writing of this fanfiction and all are used under the strictures of of the Berne Convention.


End file.
